A tiny Central American country abolished its entire army in 1948 and poured the money into schools and healthcare instead, and decades later it consistently ranks among the happiest and longest-living nations on Earth.

There are a small number of large decisions in twentieth-century political history that turned out, decades later, to have delivered almost exactly what the people who made them said they would. The Marshall Plan is one. The GI Bill is another. The Danish energy transition is a third. And the abolition of the Costa Rican army, made by a provisional junta in December 1948, sits comfortably alongside them as one of the most consequential and best-vindicated national policy decisions of the past century.

It is also, on almost any comparative measure of population and geography, the most improbable. Costa Rica in 1948 had a population of roughly eight hundred thousand, a per capita GDP well below the Latin American average, and had just emerged from a forty-four-day civil war that had killed approximately two thousand people. This was not the profile of a country you would have expected to reinvent itself as a model of demilitarised social democracy over the following three-quarters of a century. But that is what happened.

The forty-four days that reset the country

The trigger was an election. In February 1948, the sitting party of President Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia challenged the results of a presidential vote that opposition candidate Otilio Ulate had clearly won, and the Congress, dominated by the incumbents, annulled the election result. What followed was a five-week civil war led by the exiled political figure José Figueres Ferrer, who returned to Costa Rica with a paramilitary force known as the National Liberation Army. Figueres won the war on 24 April 1948. He then took power as the head of a provisional junta known as the Founding Junta of the Second Republic, which was to govern the country for eighteen months while a new constitution was drafted.

During those eighteen months, Figueres and the junta made a series of decisions that would reshape Costa Rica for the rest of the century. They granted women the right to vote. They abolished the racial segregation laws still on the books. They nationalised the banking sector. They created a universal healthcare framework. They restructured the electoral system to remove political influence from vote counting. And on 1 December 1948, at a public ceremony at the Bellavista Barracks in San José, Figueres personally took a sledgehammer to a wall of the country’s main military installation, declared the National Army abolished, and announced that the funds previously spent on maintaining it would be transferred to the Ministry of Public Education.

According to the World Future Council’s detailed policy analysis of the Costa Rican constitutional abolition, published as part of its Future Policy database on demilitarisation and honoured in 2013 at a ceremony at the UN Headquarters in New York recognising Costa Rica as one of few states to have constitutionally abolished its armed forces, the abolition was enshrined the following year in Article 12 of the new Costa Rican Constitution, which came into effect on 7 November 1949, and which states in plain constitutional language that “the Army as a permanent institution is abolished. There shall be the necessary police forces for surveillance and the preservation of public order.” The former Bellavista Barracks became the National Museum of Costa Rica. Figueres, having drafted and enacted the constitution his junta had promised, then handed power over to Ulate, the original opposition winner of the 1948 election, in what became one of the more graceful transitions of power in Latin American political history. Figueres would go on to be democratically elected president twice more, in 1953 and 1970.

What seventy-five years of school-and-hospital budgets actually produced

The redirection of money was substantial. According to the same World Future Council analysis, drawing on the United Nations Human Development Report 2013, by 2009 Costa Rica was investing 6.3 per cent of its GDP in education and 7 per cent in health. Both figures were well above the Latin American regional average, and both were roughly comparable to the education and health spending ratios of northern European welfare states. The universal healthcare system, administered through the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social, provides care to every Costa Rican citizen and legal resident regardless of employment status or income. Primary and secondary education is free and compulsory. Higher education at the public universities is heavily subsidised. Life expectancy at birth in Costa Rica has risen from roughly fifty-six years in 1950 to roughly eighty-one years today, higher than the United States figure despite the country having a per capita GDP of about one-quarter of what the United States has.

The Nicoya Peninsula, on the country’s Pacific coast, is one of only five regions in the world designated by the demographer Dan Buettner and colleagues as a Blue Zone, meaning a geographic area whose inhabitants routinely live to ages significantly beyond the global average. Nicoyan men in particular have some of the highest recorded life expectancies of any male population on Earth, with rates of centenarian survival that are several times higher than the national averages of most developed countries. The Nicoyan longevity, according to the demographic literature, is a product of the region’s plant-based diet, physically active lifestyle, tight family networks, low chronic stress, and, according to Buettner’s own writing on the subject, the general absence of the kind of economic and social anxieties that shorten life expectancy in wealthier but more precarious societies.

The happiness rankings have followed a similar trajectory. Costa Rica has topped the Happy Planet Index, the alternative national ranking that combines life satisfaction, life expectancy, ecological footprint, and inequality into a single measure, on multiple occasions across the last twenty years. According to Time Out’s coverage of the World Happiness Report 2026, published in March 2026 by the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre in partnership with Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Costa Rica has now ranked in the top five happiest countries in the world for the first time in the twelve-year history of that particular ranking, coming in at number four globally behind only Finland, Iceland, and Denmark. It is the only non-Nordic country in the top five. It is also the first Latin American country ever to place in the top five. And it is one of only two countries with a per capita GDP below thirty thousand US dollars to appear anywhere in the top fifteen.

What the underlying data actually shows, once the various rankings are decomposed into their components, is that Costa Rica scores unusually high on the qualitative measures the reports weight most heavily. Social support networks are strong. Perceived freedom to make life choices is high. Trust in institutions is high. Perceived corruption is low compared to regional peers. Healthy life expectancy is high. And personal life evaluation scores, meaning the direct question the report asks each survey respondent about their own life satisfaction, are consistently strong across income levels, meaning the happiness is distributed rather than concentrated. Which is roughly what the direct beneficiaries of seventy-five years of school-and-hospital budgets would be expected to report, and which is what they do report.

None of which is to suggest that Costa Rica has solved every problem it ever had. Crime rates in urban San José have risen substantially in the past decade. Drug trafficking through the country’s Caribbean coast is a genuine concern. Income inequality, while lower than the Latin American average, is not low by developed-world standards. The universal healthcare system faces the same fiscal pressures that every universal healthcare system faces in an ageing population. And the country’s defence, in the absence of an army, has depended for most of the past seventy-five years on an implicit security guarantee from the United States that may or may not remain reliable in future decades.

But the underlying insight of the December 1948 decision has held up remarkably well. A country the size of West Virginia, with fewer resources than most of its neighbours, decided seventy-five years ago that it would rather have functional schools and functional hospitals than a functional army, and that if it kept doing that consistently for long enough it might eventually turn into a genuinely good place to live. It kept doing it. And it did.